As lunatics like John McCain shout that American troops need to return to Iraq and/or blame Obama for recent events, saner minds have connected the dots - a task that truly isn't difficult - and lay the blame for today's disaster in Iraq where it really belongs: at the feet of Chimperator George W. Bush and Emperor Palpatine Cheney and their minions who lied to the American people and launched the nation on a fool's errand 11 years ago. Not only was the invasion ill planned, but not apparent thought was ever really given to the issue of what happen after Saddam Hussein was toppled from power. Meanwhile, thousands of young Americans lost their lives for ultimately nothing and America went a go way towards bankrupting itself. Yet the GOP seemingly still hasn't learned. A piece by Agence France-Presse reprinted in The Raw Story should be mandatory reading for everyone in Congress. Here are article excepts:

The rise of Al-Qaeda-linked
militants in Iraq can be traced to America's invasion of the country
more than a decade ago, as it left a power vacuum and unleashed
sectarian bloodletting, experts said Friday.

With television footage of
Sunni extremists sweeping across Iraq this week, critics of former
president George W. Bush's decision to invade in 2003 said the onslaught
offered yet more proof of the war's disastrous fallout.

Neoconservatives who backed
Bush's decision touted the war as a way to build a model for democracy
in the Middle East. Instead, it has fueled an explosive Sunni-Shiite
divide that is still sending shockwaves through the region, experts
said.

For University of Michigan
history professor Juan Cole, events in Iraq are "an indictment of the
George W. Bush administration, which falsely said it was going into Iraq
because of a connection between Al-Qaeda and Baghdad." "There was none," said Cole, an outspoken opponent of the invasion.

But by occupying and
"weakening" Iraq, the Bush administration ironically created conditions
that allowed Al-Qaeda "to take and hold territory in our own time," he
wrote.

The late Iraqi dictator Saddam
Hussein was long painted as an arch-enemy by the United States, but
more than ten years since US-led forces toppled his regime, his era
appears relatively stable and innocuous compared to the virulent threats
now engulfing Iraq and causing alarm in Washington.

Saddam's fall opened the
door to an emboldened Iran extending its reach across the region, a
Shiite-led government that has alienated Sunnis and helped give birth to
Al-Qaeda linked extremists now entrenched in Iraq and Syria, analysts
said.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow had foreseen a fiasco from the outset.

"We warned long ago that the adventurism the Americans and the British started there would not end well," Lavrov said Thursday.

Without referring to Bush by
name, Lavrov said the situation in Iraq has been "deteriorating at an
exponential rate" ever since the Americans ousted Saddam. Other commentators blamed
the Bush administration for the wholesale dismantling of Baghdad's
entire government apparatus without building an alternative.

"There's plenty of room for finger-pointing for the debacle in Iraq.
Let's not forget the disastrous decision to start the war in 2003 as the
place to begin finger-pointing," Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the
Brookings Institution and former CIA officer, told AFP.

As for McCain, if he thinks America "won" in Iraq, then I guess he thinks we "won" in Vietnam. The man needs his head examined.

I will be candid. I find David Brat, the Tea Party hero who defeated Eric Cantor last week in the GOP primary, in many ways to be down right scary. He's in bed with the Christian Right - the Tea Party is after all 85-90% far right Christian - and certainly is no friend to gays or anyone who isn't a white heterosexual conservative Christian. But, as a piece in Politico notes - he also is no friend of those in the GOP who are striving to return America to the Gilded Age of 100+ years ago. In fact, a some of his economic positions almost sound liberal when he is condemning wealth disparity and rapacious big business. Thus, Brat may well be the unexpected leader of a revolt against the agenda of the Koch brothers and others of their ilk within the GOP who see themselves as a reincarnation of the robber barons of old. Here are some article highlights:

All of these explanations [as to why Cantor lost] may be at
least partially true. But perhaps the enduring significance of this election
will be that Brat’s campaign was a textbook example of the new right-wing
populism. It also revealed affinities with populist campaigns going back to the
19th century as well as curious similarities with left-wing populism in more
recent years.

The most striking aspect of Brat’s
core stump speech is that while he is caustically critical of politicians from
both parties, his main target is business and the “gazillionaires” who suck up
a disproportionate share of America’s wealth. He blasts his opponent for having
voted for TARP (thereby rewarding the big banks, Wall Street and America’s
Chinese creditors) and the farm bill (enriching huge agribusiness), as well as
for watering down the STOCK Act, which would have prevented members of Congress
from engaging in insider trading. But Cantor’s real puppet-masters, according
to Brat, are the “crony capitalists” on K Street and nefarious business
organizations like the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable. Cantor
is “completely beholden to corporate interests” and seeks “to sell America to
the highest bidder.”

There’s some truth to this critique.
As one Wall Street Journal
headline on his big-money ties succinctly put it, “Eric Cantor’s loss a blow to
Wall Street.”

But Brat goes further. Business
influence is so entrenched and widespread on Capitol Hill, he says, that “There
is just one party up in D.C. right now”: the money-and-power party. While the
“donor class” has easy access to Congress, the business-controlled government is
not just indifferent to average citizens but actively despises them and wants
to take away their freedoms. The government is actively persecuting ordinary
people through NSA spying, IRS investigations and regulations that force
families to spend their money on expensive light bulbs rather than food. And
the public has no voice, since business controls the media while establishment
Republicans like Cantor silence voters through “slating”and other
machine-politics tactics. The result is that the United States has become a
ruined, broken country . . . . .

[A]lthough Brat depicts illegal
immigration as the No. 1 national problem, he focuses his ire not so much on
the immigrants themselves as on the corporate interests that require their
political lackeys to vote for open borders and amnesty. The “big guys” thereby
get to enjoy cheap immigrant labor while also benefiting from immigrants
driving down wages for American workers.

Much of Brat’s rhetoric could have
been lifted directly from the 1892 platform of the People’s Party, better known
as the Populists. Like Brat, the Populists of old declared that they were
living in “a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material
ruin.” At the root of this corruption were big businesses and great fortunes
that dominated both parties, silenced public opinion and “subsidized or
muzzled” the media.

I suspect that the so-called GOP establishment does not want to see too many more David Brats come to the fore.

As noted in previous posts, one of the favored memes of the Christofascists currently is that Christians are facing persecution and, if one listens to demagogue and hate group leaders Tony Perkins, soon gays will loading Christians into box cars and subjecting them to a revised version of the Holocaust. Of course, none of the claims of persecution are true. They are merely more of the many lies knowingly disseminated by what I call the professional Christian crowd which needs to whip increasingly high levels of hysteria in order to keep shaking down the ignorant and gullible for money. The irony, of course, is that nowadays, no one lies and is more dishonest than the "godly Christians." As I have said many times, if their lips are moving, it is a pretty safe bet that they are lying. A new study looks at the Christian persecution myth and, as one might expect, finds it to be totally untrue. If Christians are facing anything socially, it is merely increased opposition to their persecution of others, gays naturally being among the favored targets of Christian hate and mistreatment. Having one's ability to persecute others does not mean that one is being persecuted. Here are some of the study findings:

None of these stories is true. But each has become a stock tale for
Religious Right broadcasters, activists, and in some cases elected
officials. These myths – which are becoming ever more pervasive in the
right-wing media – serve to bolster a larger story, that of a majority
religious group in American society becoming a persecuted minority,
driven underground in its own country.

This narrative has become an important rallying cry for a movement
that has found itself on the losing side of many of the so-called
“culture wars.” By reframing political losses as religious oppression,
the Right has attempted to build a justification for turning back
advances in gay rights, reproductive rights and religious liberty for
minority faiths.

The frantic warnings, fueled by individual persecution myths, range from
the insistence that conservative Christians are losing their right to
free speech to the claim that the U.S. is on the verge of instituting
unconstitutional hate speech laws to dire predictions that religious
faith itself might soon be criminalized.

The claim that efforts to draw a line between church and state represent
a suppression of the individual exercise of religion is key to the
Right’s persecution narrative. In order to convincingly argue that being
on the losing side of a policy debate or a legal argument amounts to
religious persecution, you must first establish that the media,
government and the culture at large are actively hostile to people of
faith.

The most prolific manufacturer and promoter of apocryphal stories of
American Christian persecution working today is Fox News reporter Todd
Starnes. If a story emerges about a service member punished for his or
her Christian beliefs or a schoolchild banned from talking about
Christmas, it most likely originated with or was promoted by Starnes.
And there’s a good chance the facts have been either severely distorted
or completely fabricated.

No matter how quickly they are debunked, however, these stories are used
to build a narrative that bolsters the Religious Right’s political
goals…and benefits Starnes himself.

Warnings about the persecution of conservative Christians have gone hand
in hand with the rapid success of the gay rights movement in politics,
courts and public opinion. This is not a coincidence.

In a 2013 report for Political Research Associates,
scholar Jay Michaelson documents how the persecution narrative was at
the core of religious conservatives’ response to desegregation, the end
of school-sponsored school prayer and the victory for abortion rights in
Roe v. Wade.

But nowhere has the Religious Right lost more ground in recent years than on the issue of gay rights. . . . As the anti-gay movement found itself on the defensive, it began to
increasingly embrace the “religious liberty” theme. While dire warnings
about persecution of conservative Christians have been in the Religious
Right’s vocabulary for decades, the success of the gay rights movement
has brought them to the center of its strategy.

The goal of the Religious Right’s persecution narrative is not only to
carve out broad exemptions to civil laws; many use it to promote
policies that suppress the free exercise rights of those who do not share a specific set of conservative Christian values.

The Religious Right’s “religious liberty” argument too often translates
into an effort to suppress the liberties of people who don’t share their
specific religious beliefs: people of other faiths, atheists, women
seeking reproductive freedom, LGBT people and Christians who don’t share
the Religious Right’s political agenda.

[U]sing the resonant rhetoric of religious persecution, bolstered by
often-bogus stories of purported anti-Christian activities, the
Religious Right has attempted to tip this balance away from pluralism
and accommodation to a legal system that allows individuals and
businesses to broadly exempt themselves from policies they disagree with
– even when that means trampling on the religious rights of others.

As I have maintained for some time now, the Christofascists are not nice or decent people. They are selfish and their principal message is one of hate, division and discrimination. They are a cancer that needs to be suppressed in society. Their ultimate goal is to subvert the U.S. Constitution and to deprive other citizens of their legal rights and protections.

I for one always opposed the Iraq War. First and foremost because the U.S. went to war on the basis of deliberate lies formulated and disseminated by the evil Bush/Cheney regime, lies that a diligent press could have and should have totally exposed had it not for the most part acted as a lap dog to Bush/Cheney. My second reason for opposing the war was because no one seemed willing to face the question of what would happen once the Hussein regime was overthrown. Short of a permanent U.S. occupation, nothing was going to keep the country from ultimately blowing apart - something we are seeing take place before our eyes currently. With a son-in-law who did three tours in the Middle East and who suffered sever wounds on his last tour, I can understand the feeling of veterans who are saddened if not distraught to see Iraq spiraling out of control. They lost friends and loved ones and often spilled some of their own blood in a war that should never have been waged. I can only hope that if they feel anger that the anger will be directed at the right target: Bush/Cheney and the rubber stamp GOP controlled Congress that set this disaster in play. More importantly, they need to realize that the failed GOP policies continue and that if they want justice, they need to throw Republicans out of office everywhere. Better yet, they could start demanding that Bush, Cheney and others be put on trial for war crimes. A piece in the New York Times looks at the ongoing disaster and the frayed emotions of many veterans:

A
few weeks before their battalion was to get new mine-resistant
vehicles, Capt. Adam P. Snyder, Pvt. Dewayne L. White and Sgt. Eric J.
Hernandez were speeding toward a mission in Baiji, Iraq, when a roadside
bomb engulfed their Humvee in flames, killing the two enlisted men.
Captain Snyder, 26, died the next day, Dec. 5, 2007.

Matthew
Adkins, then a self-described “butterbar” lieutenant, regarded the
captain as a mentor, and his death leveled him. Hearing this week that
Baiji was on the brink of being overrun by Sunni militants, he
immediately thought of Captain Snyder, phoned his girlfriend, and cried.

“You
think about those costs that can never be recouped,” Mr. Adkins said in
an interview from Talkeetna, Alaska, where he works as a field manager
for pipeline surveys. “I remember driving those Humvees to Balad Air
Base to get our new MRAPs, and thinking if we had these things two weeks
ago, they’d still be alive.”

About
800 American troops lost their lives, and many more were wounded, in
those territories, the homeland of Saddam Hussein and his Baathist
loyalists. For the comrades of those fallen troops, the grim news this
week has left them struggling to reconcile the sacrifices that were made
with the speed and magnitude with which northern Iraq is falling to
insurgents.

For
these soldiers, it brought the same wrenching dismay to the Army that
Marines felt when Falluja fell to insurgents in January. But there is
also a clear sense among many that this is different, and worse: Iraq
could still be a functioning state after rebels seized parts of Anbar
Province, but the capture of so many northern cities has imperiled
everything the military once thought it might have accomplished.

Phillips McWilliams, a platoon leader now studying for the bar in Columbia, S.C., . . . . had
predicted the eventual implosion of Iraq, his parents reminded him
recently. And he always had doubts about whether the Iraqi forces they
were training could ever secure the country after American forces left.
But he is still struggling to reconcile the developments of the past few
days.

“Part
of me wants to say that everything we did or attempted to do is being
torn asunder, that it is all for naught,” he said. “But I’m certainly
very proud of what we did; I just don’t know how I feel yet. I’m very
conflicted. I just don’t know what is going to happen, but it doesn’t
look good.”

Mr.
Sykes is now several years out of alcohol addiction and PTSD treatments
he entered after a breakdown following a 2010 trip to Fort Pierce,
Fla., where Captain Snyder is buried beneath a marble obelisk. “I drank
myself into oblivion, and basically lost it” after the visit, Mr. Sykes
said.

He
is better now, married, and working as a policy aide on Capitol Hill.
It was a hard road back, especially because he now considers the
occupation of Iraq “one giant boondoggle.”

“Some
guys just let it become all-consuming and they can never get past it,
and their lives become one big rehashing of the same things,” said Mr.
Sykes, who talks to Captain Snyder’s mother regularly. “You have to
acknowledge it and not fill up with hate, or your anger will consume
you.”

Sitting
at his office in Alaska after a long day visiting crews, Mr. Adkins
said he hoped the Iraqi government could claw back some of what it lost
this week, otherwise “all that human capital spent on it was possibly
for nothing.”

“That’s what I’m holding onto right now,” he said.

We need to NEVER forget that every American who died was as good as murdered by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al. If we forget this reality and fail to hold these foul men accountable for what they did, America is one step closer to another Iraq like disaster.

Virginia Chief Justice Cynthia Kinser has announced that she will step down from the court this year. Kinser, who was a law school classmate appointed to the court by our mutual classmate, George Allen, proved herself to be no friend of LGBT equality when I argued before the Court in Moore v. Virginia Museum of Natural History and, indeed seem outraged by my suggestion that anti-gay discrimination should be ruled illegal under Virginia's laws banning employment discrimination based on religious belief. As the plethora of same sex marriage cases have made clear, the sole motivation to discriminate and against gays always proves to be religion. Sadly, Kinser displayed a mindset much like that of the members of the Virginia Supreme Court who twice upheld Virginia's ban on interracial marriage before the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in an struck down the law in Loving v. Virginia. Virginia has a long history of being on the wrong side of history and Kinser maintained that tradition during her tenure on the Court. Here are highlights from the Washington Post:

The first female chief justice of the Virginia Supreme Court plans to retire this year.

Justice
Cynthia D. Kinser — first appointed to the state’s high court in 1997
and elected by her peers as chief justice in February 2011 — announced
in a news release that she intends to step down from her post this year.
Kristi S. Wright, a court spokeswoman, said Kinser wants to spend more
time with her husband and travel.

Kinser, a Lee County, Va.,
native who received her law degree from the University of Virginia, was
the first woman to be selected as chief justice of Virginia’s Supreme
Court. She worked previously as a federal magistrate judge and as the
commonwealth’s attorney for Lee County.

The Court continues to be reactionary overall and one can only hope that Gov. McAuliffe will nominate a replacement who understands that Virginia needs to move forcefully into the 21st century rather than try to maintain the 19th century.

Friday, June 13, 2014

As the post mortems continue in the wake of Eric Cantor's primary defeat on Tuesday, many excuses are being made - e.g., Cantor lost touch with his constituents - that try to avoid the fundamental reason that Cantor lost: the GOP is now the party of unreason and extremism. The GOP that many of us grew up with simply no longer exists. What killed it? The Christofascists, both those who parade around as "family values" advocates and those who hide under the Tea Party label. Even when not winning primaries such as the one that sealed Cantor's fate, the truth is that what now passes as "moderate" positions are far to the right of what the GOP once stood for. Religious fanaticism and thinly veiled white supremacist positions were once not mainstream GOP values. And most certainly, the proud rejection of knowledge and reason were not GOP values as I was growing up in a family of Republicans. A piece in the Washington Post looks at the slow death of the GOP at the hands of its self-created Frankenstein monster. Here are excepts:

The Republican Party’s reliance on tea party support is like an
addict’s dependence on a dangerous drug: It may feel good at first, but
eventually it eats you alive.

No House majority leader had ever been ousted in a primary before Eric Cantor’s shocking defeat on Tuesday.
Republicans who tell themselves it was Cantor’s own fault — he lost
touch with his Virginia district, he tried to have it both ways on
immigration, he came to be seen as part of the Washington establishment —
are whistling past the graveyard.

[A] powerful incumbent, running in a district whose boundaries were
custom-designed for his benefit, lost by an incredible 11 percentage
points.

There can be no doubt that the tail is now wagging the
dog. The tea party should no longer be thought of as just a faction of
the GOP. It’s calling the shots.

Brat believes in fiscal restraint, which is a standard Republican
position — until it veers into nihilistic territory such as refusing to
raise the debt ceiling, as most tea party Republicans in the House have
consistently voted. He questions the federal role in setting education
policy — at a time when U.S. schools, by almost any measure, are falling
behind.

Brat also opposes comprehensive immigration reform that
could provide a path to citizenship for the more than 11 million men,
women and children who are in the United States without papers. This is
the issue that brought conservative radio talk show hosts Laura Ingraham
and Mark Levin to endorse and campaign for him.

Republican intransigence on reform threatens to make Latinos — the
biggest minority group in the nation — a longtime loyal constituency of
the Democratic Party. If this happens, simple arithmetic makes it hard
to imagine how Republicans will be able to compete in national
elections.

In other words, the tea party is pushing
the GOP toward ideological purity and electoral marginalization. Smart
Republicans don’t want to walk off the cliff. But deviating from the tea
party path, as Cantor did, can mean being sent home.

The GOP has to decide whether it intends to participate responsibly in
the enterprise of government or stand on the sidelines, shouting
invective and throwing stones. One of which just hit the majority leader
of the House of Representatives in the head.

The GOP of old is dead and gone. I do not see how it can be saved from the monster that the "GOP establishment" allowed to infect the party.

Despite the howls of protest that come from opponents of same sex marriage who refuse to admit that their opposition to marriage equality is no different than that which motivated those oppose to interracial marriage, the reality is that both are based on animus towards a group and a desire to keep the hated group inferior under the civil laws. Moreover, in both instances, religious arguments were/are used to justify discrimination. A piece in Slate looks at the echos from 47 years ago. Here are highlights:

Forty-seven years ago today, the Supreme Court handed down its opinion in Loving v. Virginia, striking down all interracial marriage bans as a violation of the 14th
Amendment. The famous case has since served as the cornerstone of the
legal battle for marriage equality: Gay marriage proponents seized upon
Loving’s due process and equal protection rationales to make their case
at the court.

Opponents of marriage equality, on the other hand, predictably tried to cordon off Loving,
insisting that it was more a case about race than a case about
marriage. Yet the legal teams dedicated to combatting gay marriage could
never quite shake off the lingering legacy of Loving. Compiled below are highlights from oral arguments at the Supreme Court in Loving, side-by-side with arguments from the Proposition 8 and DOMA
cases. See if you experience a sense of déjà vu hearing the arguments
that didn’t work the first time being trotted out for another round of
battle.

Argument: The state has a rational basis in keeping (interracial/gay) couples from getting married.

In Loving, R.D. McIlwaine III, the assistant attorney
general of Virginia, repeatedly returned to the idea that its
anti-miscegenation laws were perfectly “rational,” which would mean that
the state had every right to adopt them without judicial interference.
Here, he makes the case quite forcefully.

Now here’s Paul Clement, defender of DOMA, making a similar argument about rational basis

Argument: The framers of the 14th Amendment never expected it to protect (interracial/gay) couples.

Loving’s dual due process and equal protection arguments both spring from the 14th
Amendment, drafted and ratified shortly after the Civil War. Although
the amendment was originally designed to protect free blacks, its
protections have since been extended to women and, to some extent, gays.
Originalists, of course, have no truck with such extensions, and
opponents of women’s rights and gay rights have long pointed to the
amendment’s history to make their case.

Here, McIlwaine argues that the Civil Rights Act of 1866—a direct predecessor of the 14th Amendment, whose protections the 14th Amendment aimed to codify into the Constitution—was not designed to protect interracial couples.

And here is Justice Antonin Scalia questioning—or really, lecturing—Ted
Olson about the constitutionality of gay marriage at the time when the
14th Amendment was adopted.

Argument: The children of (interracial/gay) couples are disadvantaged because of their parents.

McIlwaine vigorously argued that children of interracial couples
“have almost insuperable difficulties in identification” that cause
“damage.” He also notes that biracial children are often referred to as
“the victims of intermarried parents and as the martyrs of intermarried
parents.”

Scalia need not call these children “victims”; the phrase “deleterious
effect” carries his meaning well enough on its own. But while the
precise terminology has changed, the arguments themselves have barely
shifted. No matter how deftly they dress up their language in polite
euphemisms, gay marriage opponents are still stealing directly from the Loving playbook. And it’s working no better today than it did 47 years ago.

As part of my new job I will be traveling to corporate headwaters in New England. My flight in the morning leaves before light and I have a full day ahead both tomorrow and Friday before I return to Hampton Roads on Friday evening. I will uploads posts as time permits.

After having my own firm for eight years, it is going to be a big change to no longer being the boss. On the other hand, a steady base salary and better benefits are hard to turn one's nose up at.

Granted, not all of the shooters who go on rampages killing innocent people are wrapped up in war right and gun obsessed ideologies. But, that said, there seem to be some striking similarities between the killers who murdered two policemen and a bystander in Las Vegas and the student who went on a shooting spree in an Oregon high school. In both cases the guns used were legally secured - which seems to always be the case - and the shooters seemingly clung to extreme ideologies that included an obsession with guns. What I find very frightening is the fact that Padgett, like the shooters in Kas Vegas outwardly looked "normal." The Daily Mail reports on the Oregon shooter:

Jared Michael Padgett, 15, the gunman
who killed a Reynolds High School student in Portland, Oregon was a
gun-obsessive who became furious with his classmates over his
presentation about Hitler one week before his shooting spree.

This
comes as Troutdale Police Chief Scott Anderson revealed that Padgett
was armed with a legally owned AR-15 rifle, which he stole from his home
and used to open fire and kill Emilio Hoffman, 14 and wound PE teacher
Todd Rispler.

Police also
revealed that Padgett arrived for his shooting spree on the school bus
and was heavily armed, with nine loaded magazines, holding several
hundred rounds carried in a guitar case - raising the possibility that
he planned on committing mass murder.

Padgett,
who took his own life in a locker toilet after killing Hoffman, was
also carrying a handgun which he did not fire and a knife.

Freshman
Kaylah Ensign, who knew Padgett since middle school, described a
gun-obsessive who lost his temper last week when giving a presentation
about a book on Adolf Hitler.

She told OregonLivethat she did not recall the name of the book, but when they discussed the Holocaust he said, 'this is life now' and 'everything really does happen for a reason.'

Indeed,
Ensign said he became extremely agitated during his presentation about
the book on the Nazi leader when members of his class began to disagree
with him.

'He got really uptight over it and started raising his voice,' she said, adding that 'he felt as if they were facts.'

On
Padgett's Facebook page, the 15-year-old liked two tactical knife
companies, M4 assault rifles and political pages such as 'Conservative
American Military Veterans Against Barack Obama' and 'We WILL NOT Be
Disarmed.'

These
strong pro-gun opinions may have been inherited from his family. His
brother-in-law Andrew Cooper wrote on Facebook that school shootings
could be prevented with more armed guards.

More wasted lives and a school shooting now happens at least once a week in America yet we still have no meaningful gun control laws that would make it more difficult for the emotionally disturbed individuals to get their hands on guns.

If one wants to see the ugly face of the underbelly of the GOP base that will be emboldened by Eric Cantor, look no farther than a group of extremists who were at a dinner gathering that turned into a celebration as it became obvious that Cantor was going down to defeat. The group consisted of a who's who of what is wrong with today's Republican Party, including the mentally disturbed Brent Bozell and hate group leader Tony Perkins, a racist and homophobe extraordinaire. BuzzFeed looks at the coven of lunacy and hate. Here are excerpts:

A small contingent of right-wing elites was
gathered for an intimate dinner party at the Great Falls, Va. home of
ForAmerica chairman Brent Bozell when returns first started trickling in
from Rep. Eric Cantor’s primary race. They weren’t there to watch
election coverage, but Tea Party Patriots president Jenny Beth Martin
couldn’t help but check her phone for the early numbers. With the first
two precincts reporting, she told the group, Cantor was trailing his
obscure opponent, an economics professor named David Brat.

“Cantor should give his concession speech now!” Bozell joked.

Everyone laughed, but it wasn’t long before their phones started
buzzing with the startling news: The House Majority Leader was about to
lose his primary to a grassroots insurgent — upending the common wisdom
in Washington that the Tea Party was dead, and serving notice to the old
guard that the grassroots wasn’t done with the Republican civil war.

The dinner guests — which included Andy Roth of the Club for Growth,
Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, Mike Needham of Heritage
Action, David Bossie of Citizens United, and prominent conservative
fundraiser Richard Norman — began hurriedly making calls to activists on
the ground, and scanning their phones for updates.

“Can you think of a greater political upset in your life? I can’t
think of one,” Bozell said over the phone, as his guests chattered
excitedly in the background. “This is stunning. This is the conservative
movement on fire.” Bozell described the group’s mood as “ebullient,”

[W]ith Cantor’s defeat, the leaders at Bozell’s dinner table had proof
that the movement was still very much alive — a fact that warranted some
gloating.

“Is the establishment going to get questions for the next week and a
half asking whether they’re dead?” Martin asked sarcastically. “The fact
of the matter is freedom is alive.”

As they dined on vegetable lasagna, the guests plotted their next
moves — from beating Thad Cochran in the Mississippi Senate runoff, to
marshaling an army of activists that would make sure the GOP nominated a
true conservative for president in 2016.

“This is good for anyone who has a connection with the grassroots,”
Bozell said. “It’s good for [Ted] Cruz, it’s good for Rand Paul.”

“The sound you just heard was the death knell of the immigration reform
within the establishment of the Republican Party. It’s kryptonite,”
Bozell said, by way of warning to Paul.

He added, “It’s time for Grover Norquist and the Chamber of Commerce to think of Plan B, because their agenda is dead.”
As his guests basked in victory, the host briefly retreated from the
celebration with his public relations consultant, Greg Mueller, to craft
a statement that they would soon blast out to reporters. The result was
thoroughly triumphant: “Eric Cantor’s loss tonight is an apocalyptic
moment for the GOP establishment. The grassroots is in revolt and
marching.”

When he returned to the dinner, Bozell was struck by the weight of the moment. “If you looked around that table and you looked at the organizations
represented, it was virtually every major conservative group in
America,” he said. “There was real muscle in that room, and a real sense
that something historic happened tonight.”

These people and groups are delusional enough as it is. If they are emboldened, it spells bad things for both the GOP and the nation.

Here in Virginia one does not register by political party. Hence at primary time, one can vote in either party primary but not both. Some speculate that Democrats may have voted for Cantor's challenger in the hope that a more extreme GOP candidate might be easier to defeat in November. Here's a sample of speculation via Andrew Sullivan:

A reader writes:

I live in the 7th District in Virginia, and I am a
Democrat who voted for David Brat in the open primary. There has been a
whisper campaign going on among the Democrats in the district for the
last few weeks and it resulted in many Democrats coming out to vote for
Brat. We felt especially encouraged after the 7th District committee
nominated Jack Trammell to be the Democratic candidate for the seat last
Sunday. We now feel we at least have a fair chance at winning it. (By
the way, Jack Trammell is a professor at the same small college as Brat,
Randolph-Macon.)

Well, not quite the Democrats of Mickey’s dreams, I guess. Update from a reader:

Here’s a theory to support your reader who, though a
Democrat, voted for Brat: in 2012, roughly 47,000 people voted in the
7th District Republican primary. This time, roughly 65,000. Now let’s
assume that of those 18,000 new voters, 16,000 were Democrats voting to
axe Cantor, then rework the numbers if they hadn’t voted: Cantor would
then have had around 29,000+ votes, and Brat would have had around
20,000+. Which would have worked out to approximately 59% for Cantor,
which is where he was at in 2012 and much closer to his internal polling
showing him with a lead of 34% among likely REPUBLICAN voters.

I’m thinking time will show that Democrats in his district were fed up with him, and decided to do something about it.

Based on past experience when Democrats have voted in GOP primaries - usually to ensure the victory of the moderate GOP candidate such as former Senator John Warner - the speculation is within the realm of the possible.

The pundits and talking heads on both sides of the political aisle totally missed the coming defeat of Eric Cantor by a largely unknown and poorly funded Tea Party warrior. Over at Bearing Drift, the various elements of Teabagistan are exulting in Cantor's demise. Meanwhile the GOP establishment has learned that it is dangerous to be cocky and that there is still life in the Frankenstein monster known as the Tea Party. What's frightening is that Cantor's loss will embolden the lunatic elements of the GOP. Meanwhile, being well of aware of the religious extremism of the Tea Party which has about an 85% identification with far right Christians, I cannot help but wonder if Cantor's Jewish faith wasn't somehow in play. Here in Virgina, there is little doubt that the far right of the GOP wants a Christian theocracy. Here are excepts from the Washington Post on the shock waves following Cantors rout last night:

The defeat of the second-ranking Republican in the House by an
ill-funded, little-known tea party-backed candidate ranks as the biggest
Congressional upset in modern memory and will immediately generate a
series of political and policy-related shockwaves in Washington and the
Richmond-area 7th district.

"People don't know how to respond because it's never been
contemplated," said one Virginia Republican strategist, granted
anonymity to speak candidly about Cantor's loss. (Worth noting: Cantor
didn't just lose. He got walloped; David Brat, his challenger, won 56
percent to 44 percent.)

In conversations with a handful of GOP operatives in the aftermath of
Cantor's loss -- a loss blamed largely on an inept campaign consulting
team that misread the level of vitriol directed at the candidate due to
his place in Republican leadership and the perception he supported
so-called "amnesty" for illegal immigrants -- there were several common
threads about what it means for politics inside and outside the House.

1. Immigration reform is dead. I'm not sure it was
ever really alive in the House -- we've written plenty about how the
average House Republican has zero incentive to support any immigration
reform -- but Cantor's loss ensures that even chatter about making minor
changes will disappear. Anytime an incumbent -- and particularly a
well-funded incumbent like Cantor -- loses there are lots of reasons for
the defeat, but this one will be cast as a rebuke of any moderation on
immigration.

2.House legislative activity will cease. Again,
there wasn't a heck of a lot of grand legislative plans before Cantor's
loss. But, that trickle will totally dry up now as Republican members
avoid doing anything -- literally, anything -- that could be used
against them in the many primaries still to come this summer and fall.
Members will be afraid of their own shadows.

3. The "establishment strike back" storyline will disappear.... In
the space of the last week, the narrative that the establishment has
finally figured out how to beat the tea party has exploded. First, state
Sen. Chris McDaniel finished ahead of Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran in
the state's GOP primary. Now, the Cantor loss.

4. ....Tea party challenges will surge. David Brat --
and McDaniel if he wins -- will become the newest tea party heroes,
taking their places alongside the likes of Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas) and
Mike Lee (Utah). In the near term, that will embolden tea partiers who
seemed dead in the water in their own attempts to take out incumbents. . . . . In the longer term, there's every reason to believe that other
prominent members of the GOP leadership -- in the House and Senate --
will face tea-party challenges come 2016.

5. The race to replace John Boehner as Speaker is now wide open.
We've written before about how difficult it will be for Boehner to hold
on to his Speakership -- assuming Republicans keep the majority this
fall. But now the heir apparent has been dragged under by a conservative
uprising. The third man in command -- House Majority Whip Kevin
McCarthy (Calif.) -- is not exactly a tea party darling or stylistically
speaking, the sort of hard-liner that the most conservative wing in the
House likes.

Cantor's defeat will continue to send rumbles through the political system for the next few days -- and even weeks and months.

It will be interesting, entertaining and in some ways frightening to watch the GOP civil war continue. The nation truly cannot afford for the GOP to be completely taken over by party elements that openly celebrate the embrace of ignorance and out right racism and homophobia.

A new article at The Daily Beast looks at the worsening conditions for gays in Russia as Vladimir Putin continues to use methods from Adolph Hitler's playbook for marginalizing Jews and making their lives a living Hell in general. Under Putin's regime, gays are being fired from their jobs, landlords are being pressured to break leases and force gays from their homes, and banks are closing accounts of gay customers. Some have said Putin's anti-gay policies underscore that he is a fascist at heart. I'd say Putin's a piece of foul smelling excrement. Here are some article excerpts:

LGBT organizations declared foreign agents in one fell swoop, gays being
blacklisted by banks, employers, and landlords—welcome to the new
reality of being LGBT under Putin.

In an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast, Tatiana Vinnichenko,
director of the Russian LGBT organization Rakurs, revealed how much most
of us in the West don’t know about Russia’s anti-gay crackdown. And all
of it is bad news.

First, official state prosecutions and
persecution of LGBT organizations has morphed and intensified.
Previously, LGBT organizations were pressured to register as “foreign agents”—spies,
basically—but those registrations were subject to judicial review. The
results were uneven: Some courts rubber-stamped the government’s
positions, but others found a lack of evidence and ruled for the LGBT
organizations.

Earlier this year, says Vinnichenko, the law was quietly changed. Now
the government has the power to declare an organization a foreign agent
as an administrative matter. In other words, what was once a matter of
law, however imperfect, is now a matter of bureaucracy. With one fell
swoop—and one that can come at any moment, without warning—a gay
community center, or film festival, or support group can be branded a
spy.

According to Vinnichenko, Russian authorities are putting pressure on
all kinds of institutions—banks, landlords, employers—not to do business
with LGBT people and LGBT organizations. Because licenses are required
for just about everything in Russia, this “pressure” is existential.
Banks are being told, “Dump your LGBT customers, or we’ll shut you
down,” she said.

Vinnichenko says all banks have been told that if they have any LGBT
organizations as clients, they will lose their licenses; it’s just a
matter of time until all of the organizations’ accounts are closed. And
the local LGBT community center she runs, she says, is in danger of losing its lease and will have nowhere else to go. No one will rent to her.

This subcontracted homophobia has largely escaped the notice of the
Western media so far. It is off the books, so to speak, propelled by
threats and extortion rather than overt acts like legislation or
prosecution. And it has plausible deniability. “Putin is asked about
LGBT people whenever he goes abroad, and he just lies or says he doesn’t
know,” said Vinnichenko. “But he knows the situation—he’s the homophobe
in chief.”

What she has in mind is for the Russian businesses participating in
the privatization of homophobia to be confronted overseas. She points to
her own university, which frequently partners with other European and
American universities. “The president should be picketed everywhere she
goes,” Vinnichenko said. So, too, should the leaders of banks and other
businesses.

And Vinnichenko is calling for the United States to follow Canada in providing expedited and “favored” review to LGBT applicants for asylum.

There is more to the sad piece that you should read. I find myself thinking that it's not a good thing to wish that someone would die, but like Hitler, I think the world would be a better place without Putin in it. Ditto for the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church. Fascism and religion are a truly foul combination.

Despite its efforts to show case the good deeds it does - Pope Francis' PR push over the last year is a part of this - the Roman Catholic Church has left a wake of broken and ruined lives over the centuries as the bitter old men in dresses in Rome and in bishoprics across the world obsess over all things sexual. Indeed the Vatican continues its jihad against gays despite Pope Francis' disingenuous seemly conciliatory statements on gays. In few places was the Church's obsession with sex and its stranglehold on society stronger than in Ireland. A piece in the Irish Times looks at the Church's history of cruelty and harm in Ireland. Here are excerpts:

The Irish psychosis whose latest expression is thousands of dead babies
in unmarked graves is a compound of four elements: superiority, shame,
cruelty and exclusion.

A Catholic priest writing in the Irish Ecclesiastical Record in
1922 under the pen-name Sagart, actually objected to the establishment
of mother-and-baby homes, not on the grounds that they were horribly
oppressive in principle, but that they might let unmarried mothers lose
their proper sense of inferiority.

The institutional church, meanwhile, was a giant
factory for the mass production of shame and secrecy. It was the Irish
secret service. In an article in The Irish Times in 1964, Michael Viney referred to “the secret-service mother-and-baby homes” run by religious orders in Ireland.

The
metaphor was not strained. Viney quoted the mother superior of a home
he visited as telling him that the young women never set foot outside of
the grounds: “They’d rather put up with a toothache than risk a visit
to the dentist in the town, where they might just meet someone who would
recognise them.”

The church’s genius was that it both generated the shame and controlled the secrets that resulted from it.

The
third element was cruelty – conscious and deliberate cruelty, aimed at
the creation of fear. Catholic Ireland locked up in mental hospitals,
industrial schools, Magdalene laundries and mother-and- baby homes an
astonishing 1 per cent of its entire population. The cruelty of these
places was not accidental.

Viney reported that the homes had well-run systems for sending letters
from inmates to London – they were then posted back to the young woman’s
family with British stamps, as if from an accommodation address in
England.

Cruelty and fear survive: the law of the land still says that a teacher
in a Catholic school can be sacked without redress for getting pregnant
outside marriage. Contempt for poor children is thriving – one third of
our children currently live in deprivation. If you think we don’t treat
vulnerable children as “deterrents” any more, have a look at the system
for asylum seekers. And of course, we’ve reverted to the use of mass
emigration as the solution to our social problems. The past has yet to
pass.

It is long past time that the Church and its hierarchy be held accountable for all of the horrors inflicted on innocents over the years. Thankfully, the support for the Church in Ireland is in a long overdue free fall.

I hold no love for Congressman Eric Cantor who I have long viewed as a sleazy political whore only too willing to sell out to the ugliest elements in the GOP base. Thus, normally, I'd be happy to see him go down in electoral defeat. But today Cantor has apparently lost the GOP primary for his district to a Tea Party candidate who makes Cantor look not only sane but reasonable. Truly no one seems to have seen this coming, including his primary challenger David Brat who was out spent by Cantor many times over. With 94% of the precincts reporting, Cantor is down by more than 7000 votes. The take away for Democrats is that turning out their base in November is absolutely critical because the Republican base is like a bunch of rabid dogs that WILL turn out. Here are highlights from the Richmond Times Dispatch on today's surprising results:

Economist David Brat of Randolph-Macon College has upset House
Majority Leader in a Republican primary, a stunning defeat for the
veteran congressman who appeared next in line to become speaker of the
House.

Brat, a professor with little name ID toppled a Republican titan
who had not faced a close challenge since he was first elected in 2000.

Brat, dwarfed by Cantor
in spending, drummed home the immigration issue, accusing the incumbent
of favoring "amnesty" for illegal immigrants. Cantor denied the charge,
saying only that children of illegal immigrants should not suffer
because their parents brought them into the country.

A thunderous cheer went
up at Brat's victory party at an office park in Glen Allen, when word
reached people in the crowd that AP had called the contest.

Brat does not want to speak publicly until he is absolutely sure, perhaps a sign that he is almost as shocked as Cantor must be.
The stormy Republican primary
in the 7th District has exposed discontent among Republican Party
activists and has drawn national attention. Immigration reform drew much
debate during the contest that played out in voters’ mailboxes and
through TV ads.

The winner of the primary will face Democrat John “Jack” Trammell.

Cantor held a massive
cash advantage but Brat drew some star power, including talk radio host
Laura Ingraham who held a rally for Brat in Cantor’s own backyard.

Politico has added details and looks at the earthquake this represents for Washington DC and Congress:

It’s one of the most stunning losses in modern House politics, and
completely upends the GOP hierarchy in Virginia and Washington. Cantor
enjoyed a meteoric rise that took him from chief deputy whip, to
minority whip to majority leader in the span of 13 years. He had long
been seen as John Boehner’s successor as speaker.

The loss will ripple across Washington, too: from political
consultants who worked for Cantor to his aides who decamped for K
Street, there will be reverberations.

There were warning signs that kept piling up. In April, Brat
supporters vastly outnumbered Cantor allies at local GOP meetings. Then
in May, tea party fueled activists knocked off Cantor’s choice for local
GOP chair in Cantor’s home base of Henrico County. But Cantor’s aides
consistently brushed off the challenge, telling reporters and fellow GOP
aides that the contest didn’t merit the media coverage it was getting.

Brat severely trailed in fundraising, pulling in $200,000 this cycle compared to Cantor’s $2 million. But Cantor took the primary challenge seriously.

Like the Christofascists who they welcomed with open arms out of short term expediency, the GOP establishment at first welcomed the Tea Party. Now they face a double Frankenstein monster of their own creation.

Translate This Page

Contact Me to Order Title Work

LGBT Legal Services

About Me

Out gay attorney in a committed relationship; formerly married and father of three wonderful children; sometime activist and political/news junkie; survived coming out in mid-life and hope to share my experiences and reflections with others.
In the career/professional realm, I am affiliated with Caplan & Associates PC where I practice in the areas of real estate, estate planning (Wills, Trusts, Advanced Medical Directives, Financial Powers of Attorney, Durable Medical Powers of Attorney); business law and commercial transactions; formation of corporations and limited liability companies and legal services to the gay, lesbian and transgender community, including birth certificate amendment.

Disclaimer on Opinions and Content

This Blog contains content that may be innapropriate for readers under the legal age of 18. IF YOU ARE UNDER 18 YEARS OF AGE, PLEASE LEAVE NOW. Thank you

This is an opinion and commentary blog and the opinions and contents of this Blog - including opinions expressed concerning opponents of LGBT equality - are the opinions only of the individual blogger and should not be attributed to any other individuals or to any organization of which the blogger is a past or current member.

Followers

Michael-in-Norfolk disclaims any and all responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, completeness, legality, reliability, operability, or availability of information or material displayed on this site and does not claim credit for any images or articles featured on this site, unless otherwise noted. All visual content is copyrighted to it's respectful owners. Information on this site may contain errors or inaccuracies, and Michael-in-Norfolk does not make warranty as to the correctness or reliability of the site's content. If you own rights to any of the images or articles, and do not wish them to appear on this site, please contact Michael-in-Norfolk via e-mail and they will be promptly removed. Michael-in-Norfolk contains links to other Internet sites. These links are provided solely as a convenience and are not endorsements of any products or services in such sites, and no information or content in such site has been endorsed or approved by this blog.